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Japan’s crowdsourced bookkeeping startup MerryBiz secures funding from Opt Ventures

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See the original story in Japanese. Tokyo-based crowdsourced bookkeeping startup MerryBiz announced this week that it has fundraised an undisclosed amount of funding from Opt Ventures, the investment arm of Japanese leading online ad agency Opt Holding (TSE:2389). As an investment from Opt Ventures Fund Part-I, this follows the VC firm’s recent investment in Japanese translation startup WOVN.io. For MerryBiz, this follows their previous funding from Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital back in May 2014. MerryBiz provides a bookkeeping service under the same name by reading photocopies of withdrawal details on passbooks, credit card utilization bills and payment statements in addition to receipts for expenses. Under the title derived from a name of goat species, the company has rolled out a new function every three months. In January this year, MerryBiz started receiving outsourced bookkeeping and tax return processing services for freelancers in association with Japanese legal portal Bengo4.com. MerryBiz CEO Hiroki Kudo told The Bridge that he will strengthen his engineering team and marketing efforts for customer acquisition: We will hire engineers from overseas to develop our service for Japanese users, meaning building a global team in the company. Since everything changes so fast in the online industry, we…

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MerryBiz founder and CEO Hiroki Kudo

See the original story in Japanese.

Tokyo-based crowdsourced bookkeeping startup MerryBiz announced this week that it has fundraised an undisclosed amount of funding from Opt Ventures, the investment arm of Japanese leading online ad agency Opt Holding (TSE:2389). As an investment from Opt Ventures Fund Part-I, this follows the VC firm’s recent investment in Japanese translation startup WOVN.io. For MerryBiz, this follows their previous funding from Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance Venture Capital back in May 2014.

MerryBiz provides a bookkeeping service under the same name by reading photocopies of withdrawal details on passbooks, credit card utilization bills and payment statements in addition to receipts for expenses. Under the title derived from a name of goat species, the company has rolled out a new function every three months. In January this year, MerryBiz started receiving outsourced bookkeeping and tax return processing services for freelancers in association with Japanese legal portal Bengo4.com.

MerryBiz CEO Hiroki Kudo told The Bridge that he will strengthen his engineering team and marketing efforts for customer acquisition:

We will hire engineers from overseas to develop our service for Japanese users, meaning building a global team in the company.

Since everything changes so fast in the online industry, we need to be close contact with each others onsite in the team so that we can move forward quicker. Having new employees, we want to build up an artificial intelligence or machine learning-based system.

We were told that the company is employing a Swedish engineer for now while still screening for new engineering applicants from Germany, Spain and India. Their engineers will focus on enhancing features for the Japanese market for the time being, but the company wants to adopt the service into the global market so that it can accept reading receipts issued in different countries.

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Edited by “Tex” Pomeroy

Japan’s WOVN.io, multilingual support platform for websites, secures $1.1 million funding

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See the original story in Japanese. WOVN.io instantly turns a website into a multilingual environment just by adding a single Javascript code to a website source. Tokyo-based Minimal Technologies, the company behind the service, announced in July that it has partnered with Recruit Communications, and it also told The Bridge that the service has been adopted into more than 4,500 websites in the US, Japan, Brazil, Spain, and other countries. The company announced today that it has fundraised 130 million yen ($1.1 million) from Opt Ventures and Nissay Capital. Opt Ventures is the investment arm of Japan’s largest online ad agency Opt (TSE:2389) while Nissay Capital is that of Japan’s leading insurance company Nissay, or Nippon Life Insurance Company (TSE:6271). In a previous interview, the company said WOVN.io earns 90% of its revenue stream from their enterprise plan users. They plan to use the latest funds to strengthen their position as a marketing tool to help businesses expand globally. WOVN++, the SEO-enabled library launched in late July in beta, is also part of the strategy. Thanks to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics effect, there are now more websites available in English. I expect that WOVN.io will accelerate this trend and help…

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See the original story in Japanese.

WOVN.io instantly turns a website into a multilingual environment just by adding a single Javascript code to a website source. Tokyo-based Minimal Technologies, the company behind the service, announced in July that it has partnered with Recruit Communications, and it also told The Bridge that the service has been adopted into more than 4,500 websites in the US, Japan, Brazil, Spain, and other countries.

The company announced today that it has fundraised 130 million yen ($1.1 million) from Opt Ventures and Nissay Capital. Opt Ventures is the investment arm of Japan’s largest online ad agency Opt (TSE:2389) while Nissay Capital is that of Japan’s leading insurance company Nissay, or Nippon Life Insurance Company (TSE:6271).

In a previous interview, the company said WOVN.io earns 90% of its revenue stream from their enterprise plan users. They plan to use the latest funds to strengthen their position as a marketing tool to help businesses expand globally. WOVN++, the SEO-enabled library launched in late July in beta, is also part of the strategy.

Thanks to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics effect, there are now more websites available in English. I expect that WOVN.io will accelerate this trend and help make more content from Japan available to the global audience.

Translated by Masaru Ikeda
Edited by Kurt Hanson